4 Pilgrims Seeking a ‘Big Picture’
4
Pilgrims Seeking a ‘Big Picture’:
The Balcony and the Road
‘We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience.’1
T.S. Eliot
How do we make sense of our world and our lives? Many find refuge in the delusion that we can somehow attain a privileged viewpoint, standing above the flux of history so that we can see the overall course of our own lives in their proper perspective. Most, however, realise that our view is limited because of our insertion into the historical process. For the writers of the Middle Ages, the human being was a viator – someone who was travelling along the via of life, a pilgrim and sojourner in our strange world. And as we travel, we ask questions. Some are functional. Where can I find food and water? But some are deeper questions. Why are we on this road in the first place? Where does it take us? What is the point of travelling along it?
Recently I found myself reading one of the neglected classics of biosemiotics – the study of the forms of communication and signification found in and between living systems – in preparation for a class I teach at Oxford University. These days, few people read Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944).2 Yet his account of how animals adapt to their environments is now seen as being of seminal importance. In his essay ‘A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans’, Uexküll introduced the idea of a ‘web of meaning’ – an internal framework of understanding through which we and other living creatures try to make sense of our world, and which guides us as we journey. Just as a spider spins its threads, so we spin our relations to the world around us, and weave these into a firm web which shapes our existence.3 Uexküll called this web of meaning an Umwelt – a perceptual world which shapes how we experience and interpret our lives and context. Human beings are by nature meaning-seeking animals, weaving webs of meaning to guide and govern their lives.
Human beings have asked these questions of meaning since the beginning of history, and they remain as important today as ever. So how can we answer them? Some are content to accept the prevailing wisdom of their peers.4 In an act of tribal loyalty, they align themselves with the ideas and values of a social group which is seen to be powerful or fashionable. Truth is here seen primarily as an act of intellectual and moral loyalty to a community into which we are born, or which we choose to enter. Truth is thus collusion with a group-think – about ‘what it is good for us to believe’, or what we are required to believe if we are to remain in good standing with those we regard as important and influential.
It’s neat and simple, the ideal creed of people whose status depends on acceptance by a social ‘in-group’, or of politicians anxious to retain the support of voters or party selection committees. Yet it stifles independence of thought, in that this conflicts with loyalty to a social group. So we end up locked within some cultural ‘in-group’, and as a result are unwilling to take seriously the views of other communities. That’s why fundamentalisms of every kind (whether religious, anti-religious, political or cultural) encourage social and intellectual isolation. It’s so much easier to dismiss alternative perspectives if you believe that their advocates are evil, warped or deluded. That allows you to ridicule them without taking their ideas or their personal integrity seriously, and makes it easier to argue for their exclusion from the public domain.
At a more sophisticated level, this way of thinking helped create social cohesion and conformity in the Greek city-states of the classical period, which developed their own religions and philosophies as a marker of their distinct identities. Yet, as the philosopher Richard Rorty noted, this view began to fall out of favour in classical Greek culture, partly because it was seen as incorrigibly parochial. Who wanted to be ‘confined within the horizons of the group into which one happens to be born’? Writers such as Plato championed the quest for truth without reference to the norms and beliefs of a given community. Rorty himself defended the idea that knowledge was acquired through standing within a tradition, and appropriating and honouring its ideas and values. ‘What matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right.’5 Yet surely we should try and pursue a knowledge that is independent of the culture or tradition within which we live?
We have already noted Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1732–4), one of the greatest literary works of the ‘Augustan Age’. This rich and complex poem is a shrewd reflection on the aspirations and limits of being human, and our difficulties in making sense of the universe within which we find ourselves placed.6 Pope recognises that this universe appears incoherent and morally ambiguous, perhaps characterised by evil more than by good. Yet, Pope suggests, we have to take account of our frail and fallible moral and intellectual capacities in reaching this judgement. Perhaps the universe appears imperfect and incoherent to us because of the limits placed on human perception. Life seems chaotic and purposeless to us because we are immersed within the flux of things, and cannot extricate ourselves from it to catch a tantalising full glimpse of reality which alone could disclose that we have a meaningful place in a coherent universe.
This is a deeply appealing idea. It invites us to see ourselves and our world as we really are, not as we have constructed ourselves. It is about discovering the truth about our world, not inventing our own imaginary world. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein realised that meaning and happiness arise when we believe that we are thinking and living in accordance with something deeper and greater than ourselves. ‘In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what “being happy” means.’7 We need to grasp the ‘big picture’ of the universe, and position ourselves within it.
Yet we seem unable to grasp this full picture by ourselves. We need help if we are to see beyond the frustrating limits imposed upon us by being human. This is, of course, a classic theme in Christian theology. The notion of divine revelation is about the disclosure of a view of reality which we did not invent, and which lies beyond the capacity of human reason to grasp fully. Revelation is not about the violation of human reason, but a demonstration of its limits, and a disclosure of what lies tantalisingly beyond its limits. It is about the illumination of the landscape of our world, so that we can see things more clearly.
For Christians, this capacity to see things as they really are – rather than as they are glimpsed from the surface – is a gracious gift of God. Our eyes need to be opened, so that what we once deemed to be an incoherence is recognised as arising out of our inability to see fully and properly. How can we affirm and hold together the ‘heart-breaking brutality and the equally heart-breaking beauty of the world’?8 While many Christians think of the Holy Spirit primarily as a source of empowerment, perhaps the true role of the Spirit lies rather in discernment – not in ‘making us supernaturally strong’, but in ‘opening our eyes’.9 There is indeed a ‘big picture’ of our mysterious world – but it is not one that we discerned on our own, still less one that we invented. It was one that had to be shown to us.
C.S. Lewis on Seeing Things Properly
The Oxford literary critic and apologist C.S. Lewis is one of the best-known advocates of seeing the Christian faith as an illuminating and informing ‘big picture’. He expressed this idea in a signature statement, which sums up his reasons for becoming a Christian in the first place, and remaining one in the second. ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.’10
Lewis’s statement needs further development to appreciate its importance. It is not an argument for God’s existence, but rather the observation that we experience the rational and imaginative capacity of the Christian faith in and through the process of inhabiting it and using it to frame our observations and experiences. There is an interesting parallel here with reflections about the human mind. In a sense, we only experience our minds directly when we use them. The human mind is not something that we observe; rather, it is something that we experience through observing. It is not so much that we infer the existence of our minds; rather we infer the existence of everything else using our minds, and as a result come to appreciate the explanatory potential of this strange entity that we call ‘the mind’.11
Although an atheist as a young man, Lewis gradually came to see this as imaginatively deficient, locked into a ‘glib and shallow rationalism’ which failed to do justice to the richness of the world, or the deepest longings and concerns of human beings.12 Where some turned to religion in order to escape the complexity and uncertainty of the world, Lewis offers us a theological vision that does some justice to the intricacy of our world, allowing us to see it as orderly without being mechanical. Instead of the impersonal determinism of worldviews such as Marxism, Lewis places the personal reality of God at the heart of a universe that acknowledges our existence, and our role in redirecting its story.
For Lewis, Christianity provided a new way of seeing things, and hence a new way of experiencing the world and life. We see this in Lewis’s comments on Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which he suggested that the poet’s imagery of light allows us to ‘not only understand the doctrine but see the picture’.13 It is about the transition from one way of seeing our universe and life itself to another. Yet this change in the way in which we see things is so great and radical that we need to think of ourselves as a ‘new creation’. The old world that Lewis left behind was a world in which his status depended on his achievements and success. It was a world limited to what reason and science could disclose, devoid of intrinsic meaning and value.
Paul’s New Testament letters speak of Christians having the ‘mind of Christ’ (e.g., 1 Corinthians 2:16), in which a ‘new self is created because a new world is being entered’.14 Lewis’s emphasis is more easily accommodated to the related idea of the ‘enlightenment of the eyes of our heart’ (Ephesians 1:18), with its strong emphasis on the transformation of our vision of reality, as a result of the healing and renewing work of divine grace.15 For Lewis, the way in which we act within our world is shaped by the imaginative framework through which we see it.16
Lewis is a strongly visual thinker, who found the imaginative worlds of narrative to be a more adequate way of exploring and explaining ideas than conceptual analysis. In 1933, Lewis published The Pilgrim’s Regress, an allegorical account of his own conversion, and especially the difference this made to the way in which he saw the world around and within him. This early work, which many find difficult reading, is best understood as an imaginative mapping of the landscape of faith, focusing especially on the outcomes of the transition from unbelief to faith. Its central character is the pilgrim – ‘John’ – who has visions of an island that evokes an intense yet transitory sense of longing on his part. At times, John is overwhelmed by this sense of yearning, as he struggles to make sense of it. Where does it come from? What is he yearning for?
While Lewis’s account of his discovery of faith is interesting, both in terms of illuminating his personal journey of faith and the way in which he expressed this at this early stage in his career, the most important part of the work is that which describes the ‘regress’. The Pilgrim’s Regress actually describes two journeys – the first as he journeys to the mysterious island, and the second as he returns home. When John walks back through the same landscape after coming to faith – the ‘regress’ of the book’s title – he discovers that its appearance has changed. Though it is the same landscape, he is told that he is now ‘seeing the land as it really is’.17 John’s encounter with his object of desire has transformed his capacity to see himself and his world.
The basic idea of being able to see things in different ways is, of course, not unique to Lewis, having a rich history of use within the Christian tradition (for example, in Augustine of Hippo and Dante). It was also developed by the philosopher Gustav Fechner, who had a deep influence on the composer Mahler.18 Fechner argued that the world could be seen in two fundamentally different modes – the ‘daylight view of the world’, which disclosed its vibrancy and deep inner meaning, and the ‘night’ view, which was limited to its material aspects. The same thing is seen in different manners and to different extents, depending on the amount of illumination that is available.
We now need to think more carefully about the different perspectives we bring to bear on the world, as we try to make sense of it. In what follows, we shall draw on one of the most perceptive reflections on this issue – John Mackay’s justly celebrated image of the ‘Balcony and the Road’, set out in 1942.19
The Balcony and the Road
John Alexander Mackay (1889–1993) served as President of Princeton Theological Seminary from 1937 to 1959.20 Mackay spent some time during 1915 in the Spanish capital, Madrid. Spanish families, he recalled, would gather on the balcony of an upper room during the evening, so that they could look down on the bustling street beneath them, or at the stars above them. Mackay made this the basis for his reflections on the perspective of the human observer in achieving insight into both human nature and God.
For Mackay, the Balcony was a metaphor for the ‘perfect spectator, for whom life and the universe are permanent objects of study and contemplation’.21 Life on the street below can be observed with interest; it is certainly observed from a distance, with a sense of detachment. Science is the supreme example of such a perspective. ‘The scientific laboratory is the Balcony at its best, and the scientist is the ideal spectator.’22 Using such tools as microscopes and telescopes, the scientist aims to cultivate an ‘objective view of things’, from which all subjectivity is eliminated.
Mackay argues that this ‘contemplative’ approach to reality failed to recognise the awkward but critically important point that observers are actually part of the reality that is being observed, and are affected by the world around them.23 Inevitably, this meant that the insights gained from the Balcony were only partial accounts of reality, and failed to do justice to its many aspects and levels.
The scientist, however, can never achieve an interpretation of life and the universe. The deeper he probes into one sphere of reality, the slighter becomes his knowledge of the whole . . . The greatest realities are such that their nature can never be known if they are treated as mere objects. Such is God, who is eternally subject, and can never be reduced to an object. Such are human beings, who are other selves that, in their inmost core, will remain impervious to the gaze of the scientist in search of objectivity.24
Mackay contrasted the view from the Balcony with life on the Road, characterised by ‘a first-hand experience of reality’.25 Those who are travelling on the Road are participants, not distant and detached observers. If they observe, it is in their capacity of those who are travelling alongside and amid those whom they observe. Truth is something to be done, not merely to be thought. It cannot be purely objective, in that it impacts upon life, and thus transforms it. It is existential, in that the thinker ‘steps out’ on the Road, committed to the journey that lies ahead.
There’s another point that needs to be made here, which is not developed by Mackay himself. The Balcony is a place of privilege, in which we look at a scene that is below us. It offers, so to speak, a God’s-eye view of things. The view from the Road is one of immersion. In addition to being participants in the journey, our vision is limited to what can be seen from the Road. We cannot escape from its limiting perspectives, and have to learn to work with them. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has argued that every viewpoint on the world or life is actually a ‘view from somewhere’.26 Nagel points out that we ‘cannot escape the condition of seeing the world from our particular insertion in it’, however much we may long for the historical and cultural detachment afforded by the Balcony. We will return to this point later, in thinking about the initial appeal and ultimate failure of some forms of Enlightenment rationalism.
We cannot rise from the road by ourselves, and attain a God’s-eye perspective. But what if that perspective was somehow to be brought to us? What if someone was able to disclose to us such a big picture, despite the fact that it lies beyond the capacity of fallen and finite humanity to discern it, save in half-glimpsed and half-imagined ways? Christianity affirms that there is indeed such a greater vision of reality that lies beyond the limits of pure reason – yet which is capable of being recognised as reasonable once it is grasped. The Christian doctrine of incarnation affirms that the God who alone sees all things from the Balcony chose to come and walk on the Road with us, allowing us to glimpse and trust a bigger picture of our journey. Yet the incarnation is not simply about the disclosure of a ‘big picture’; it is about affirming the presence of God on the Road as we travel.
Later in this work, we shall highlight the role of ‘mental maps’ of reality in human accounts of the meaning of life. So what sort of maps could be drawn from the Balcony and the Road? The ‘God’s-eye’ view of the Balcony allows a total mapping of reality, in which every interconnection is made crystal clear. Everything can be observed and depicted. But on the Road, things are different. We can’t see everything. But what we can do is tell stories about what we did, and make sketches of what we saw. Early naval navigators called these collections of wisdom a ‘Rutter’.27 The Rutter was a distillation of personal experience from those who had crossed the seas, recording the bearings on which they sailed, the obstacles they faced, and the locations of safe harbours and sources of food and water. It was a narrative of a journey, characterised by the limited perspectives of mariners on the high seas, not a detailed representation of the landscape seen in its totality. People on the Balcony could draw a diagram of what they saw; people on the Road would share stories of what they experienced.
For Mackay, the Christian faith is about life on the Road, rather than the view from the Balcony. Faith is about active engagement in life, not passive observation from a distance. The detached objectivity of science is to be welcomed, yet it restricts the capacity of science to engage with the deepest existential questions of life, including those of meaning and value. Mackay’s point is important, and easily defended. We shall explore this by looking at the idea of a ‘world line’, which plays an important role in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
World Lines and Long Pink Worms
The idea of a ‘world line’ is associated with the mathematician Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909), who developed an ‘algebra of space and time’ which identifies events by their four coordinates x, y, z and t.28 The ‘world line’ is the curve connecting a series of points in space-time which represents the history of a particle or an observer. It can be seen as a classic representation of the view from the Balcony – an objective, detached account of what is happening in the universe.
But what if the world line refers to a person, rather than a particle? To a living, thinking, conscious individual, who is trying to figure out what their individual world lines might mean, rather than to a fermion or boson? This idea was explored, somewhat playfully, in ‘Life-Line’, the first published short story of Robert A. Heinlein (1907–88), a science fiction writer with a keen sense of the importance of deeper issues of life. Heinlein asked his readers to imagine a person’s history as a ‘long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end in his mother’s womb, and the other at the grave’.29
But what lies beyond this ‘long pink worm’? What lies before birth, and after death? And how does the existentially important notion of the ‘present moment’ – the ‘Now’ – fit into this? How can we distinguish the past, present and future? All can be represented chronologically and spatially using a world line. Yet their significance cannot be represented existentially. Einstein took the view that the ‘distinction between past, present and future has only the meaning of a persistent illusion’.30 Most of us, however, find it very difficult to think neutrally and dispassionately about the transition from a past in which we did not exist, through a present in which we live and think, to a future in which we will no longer exist.
For most of us, there is a critically important subjective distinction between past, present and future which is real, which matters profoundly to us. Our own individual world lines seem very small and insignificant when set against the backdrop of cosmic time. Yet the fact remains that, although we only occupy a tiny slice of the four dimensions of space-time, we want to live good and meaningful lives – and this means trying to figure out what things (including our own world line) actually mean.
The philosopher Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) discussed this issue with Einstein during the 1940s, and came to the conclusion that Einstein believed that ‘scientific descriptions cannot possibly satisfy our human needs’.31 The human quest for meaning simply could not be met purely through physics. There were certain significant existential concerns – such as the concept of the ‘Now’ – which tantalisingly lay ‘just outside of the realm of science’. Einstein’s objective world line is the outcome of seeing our universe from the perspective of the Balcony; our quest for meaning is the outcome of seeing that universe from the perspective of the Road. We think, reflect and act within the limits and framework of Heinlein’s ‘long pink worm’, and we cannot escape this framework.
We can, however, overcome at least some of the limitations of living within this ‘long pink worm’. As Heinlein himself pointed out, these worms interconnect with others. We can transcend the limits of our own limited world lines by overhearing the thoughts and reflections of others from within their lines. Although C.S. Lewis does not frame his analysis of the importance of reading classic works of theology and literature in terms of world lines, the fundamental point he addresses is essentially the same. Lewis’s essay ‘On the Reading of Old Books’ (1944) addresses the question of how an individual thinker can see with other eyes, without losing their individuality.32 How can the limits of one person’s specific perspective be transcended, without compromising their individuality?
Lewis’s answer remains significant. It is through the reading of books that one is able to enter into someone else’s world line, and to see things as they do. Through travelling along the Road, we can learn from others who have travelled before us. The wisdom they accumulate is transferable from one person to another. By stepping into someone else’s reflections on their world line, we are able ‘to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own’.33 This process enables us to transcend our limits as subjective individuals, opening up new imaginative and reflective possibilities. ‘My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others . . . In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.’34
Mackay’s symbols of the Balcony and Road are helpful as we try to work out how to make sense of our world and our lives. In the end, we need both these perspectives and the respective toolkits that they offer. A clinically detached objective view of the world has its merits; it is, however, existentially inadequate. A purely subjective view of the world might easily be illusory and self-serving, simply echoing our own prejudices and pre-commitments. Somehow, these must be integrated into a greater whole. Facts are not enough; we need to know what they mean if we are to secure the ‘big picture’ of reality which weaves together the objective and subjective, and above all which discloses the value and significance of life.
We shall explore this theme further in the next chapter.